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Invitation: "From the Litzmannstadt Ghetto to KL Auschwitz" - educational session on 7 October 2021
"From the Litzmannstadt Ghetto to KL Auschwitz" is the title of the online educational session that will be held on 7 October 2021 to commemorate the 77th anniversary of the deportation of Jews from the Lodz Ghetto to the German Nazi Auschwitz camp. The session will take place on Zoom platform and will be translated into English.
During the session, Adam Sitarek, PhD, from the University of Lodz will deliver a lecture on the history of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto while Andrzej Strzelecki, PhD, author of the book "Deportation of Jews from the Lodz Ghetto to KL Auschwitz and their Extermination" will speak about the deportations to Auschwitz.
Marian Turski, a Holocaust survivor who was deported to Auschwitz from the Łódź Ghetto in August 1944, will be interviewed by Marek Zając, Chair of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation Council.
The session will include excerpts from speeches delivered by deportees from the Litzmannstadt Ghetto during the anniversaries of the liberation of Auschwitz.
The International Centre for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust invites teachers, educators and all persons interested in the subject to take part in the session.
Please send your application using the online form by 4 October 2021. After this date, we will send you an email with a link to the meeting.
SESSION PROGRAMME (time zone: CEST, UTC+2)
17.00 - Inauguration of the session (Andrzej Kacorzyk, director of ICEAH)
17.05 - Lecture: The Litzmannstadt Ghetto (Adam Sitarek, PhD, University of Łódź)
17.50-18.00 - break
18.00 - Deportations of Jews from the Litzmannstadt Ghetto to Auschwitz (Andrzej Strzelecki, PhD)
18:15 - meeting with Marian Turski (moderated by Marek Zając)
18:45 - Fragments of speeches given by deportees from the Litzmannstadt Ghetto (Roman Kent, Aszer Aud and Leon Weintraub)
"...My foretaste of Auschwitz was in the Łódź ghetto, where everyone in the organisation I belonged to was obliged, among others, to give 2 spoonfuls of soup every day, which was placed into a mess tin. Someone would collect the soup, and then the 2 spoonfuls collected from each organisation member were given to the sick. The case was the same for other contributions, something I later experienced in Auschwitz (...) I was in a group of ten comrades, friends and they actually cut off one-third of ten portions of bread because that's how much the people from "Canada" demanded in exchange for glasses so that I wouldn't have to starve for three days...".
Excerpt from Marian Turski's speech at the 2015 conference at the Auschwitz Museum entitled "Memory in us still immature".
In August 1944, about 67,000 Jews from the liquidated ghetto were deported to Auschwitz, of which some 45,000 were murdered in the gas chambers - some immediately after selection on the ramp, others after a certain period of stay in the so-called deposit camps. Over 3,000 Jews were registered in the camp while the remaining 19,000 were transferred to other concentration camps.
One of our online lessons is devoted to the history of the deportation of Jews from the Litzmannstadt Ghetto to Auschwitz. It is divided into 6 main chapters, in which the history of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto until 1944 is presented. The lesson also contains a detailed description of the ghetto liquidation process and the extent to which the Jews imprisoned in the ghetto were aware of their tragic situation. Subsequent sections of the lesson deal with the very moment of arrival at Auschwitz, extermination in the gas chambers and the fate of those deported from the Łódź Ghetto and then incarcerated in the camp after selection.
